Delivering Happiness a Path to Profi Ts, Passion and Purpose by Tony Hsieh Uniquely You Learn How to Shape Your Own Path to Success
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
JANUARY JANUARY 2011 Delivering Happiness A Path to Profi ts, Passion and Purpose by Tony Hsieh Uniquely You Learn how to shape your own path to success. QUICK OVERVIEW In Delivering Happiness, Tony Hsieh uses personal stories to recount his journey to becoming CEO of Zappos.com. He also shares insights on why you should have a passion for what you do, regardless of the amount of money you are making—or Business Plus walking away from. © 2010, Tony Hsieh From his childhood experiences as a worm farmer to his stint as a poker player, ISBN: 9780446563048 to becoming a multimillionaire and the CEO of a company that has been ranked 246 pages, $23.99 as one of the “Best Companies to Work For” by Fortune magazine, Hsieh’s path has followed his passion for what he believed was right for him. In the end, his objective is to do business in a way that allows him and his co-workers to be a happy and productive tribe. SUCCESS Points In this book you’ll learn: APPLY AND ACHIEVE Tony Hsieh learned from his poker-playing days that choosing the right table was • Why the type of one way to ensure success. In the same way, choosing the type of business to build business you create or represent is of critical importance. If you’re a business owner, take a moment to is the most important consider whether your business re ects your core values. If you are an employee or decision you can independent contractor, are you choosing to align yourself with an organization that make for your future has a culture and message which meshes well with your own? Greater happiness (and reduced stress) is often the result of working and living in a way that harmonizes • How your personal with your core values. What do you need to do to create alignment between your happiness and values and your work? your professional happiness are linked • Why defi ning core values for your company is crucial Page 1 SUCCESS.com SUCCESS BOOK SUMMARIES Delivering Happiness ’d played a little bit of poker in college, but like many • The guy who wins the most hands is not the guy who people, I always just considered it to be a fun form of makes the most money in the long run. gambling and had never bothered to actually study it. • The guy who never loses a hand is not the guy who makes Back in 1999, poker was not yet a mainstream activity. the most money in the long run. IMost people had never heard of the World Series of Poker, • Go for positive expected value, not what’s least risky. and TV networks like ESPN were not yet broadcasting poker • Make sure your bankroll is large enough for the game tournaments to the masses. you’re playing and the risks you’re taking. One of the most interesting things I learned about playing • Play only what you can a ord to lose. poker was the discipline of not confusing the right decision • Remember that it’s a long-term game. You will win or lose with the individual outcome of any single hand; but that’s what individual hands or sessions, but it’s what happens in the a lot of poker players do. If they win a hand, they assume they long term that matters. made the right bet, and if they lose a hand, they often assume they made the wrong bet. Strategy For the rst few months, I found poker both fun and • Don’t play games you don’t understand, even if you see challenging, because I was constantly learning, both through lots of other people making money from them. reading di erent books and through actual experience • Figure out the game when the stakes aren’t high. of playing in the eld. I started to notice similarities • Don’t cheat. Cheaters never win in the long run. between what was a good poker strategy and what made • Stick to your principles. for a good business strategy, especially when thinking • You need to adjust your style of play throughout the night about the separation between short-term thinking (such as as the dynamics of the game change. Be exible. focusing on whether I won or lost an individual hand) and • Be patient and think long term. long-term thinking (such as making sure I had the right • The players with the most stamina and focus usually win. decision strategy). • Di erentiate yourself. Do the opposite of what the rest of I noticed so many similarities between poker and business the table is doing. that I started making a list of the lessons I learned from • Hope is not a good plan. playing poker that could be applied to business: • Don’t let yourself go “on tilt.” It’s much more cost- e ective to take a break, walk around, or leave the game Evaluating Market Opportunities for the night. • Table selection is the most important decision you can make. Continual Learning • It’s okay to switch tables if you discover it’s too hard to • Educate yourself. Read books and learn from others who win at your table. have done it before. • If there are too many competitors (some irrational or • Learn by doing. Theory is nice, but nothing replaces inexperienced), even if you’re the best it’s a lot harder to win. actual experience. • Learn by surrounding yourself with talented players. Marketing and Branding • Just because you win a hand doesn’t mean you don’t have • Act weak when strong, act strong when weak. Know more learning to do. You might have just gotten lucky. when to blu . • Don’t be afraid to ask for advice. • Your “brand” is important. Culture • Help shape the stories that people are telling about you. • You’ve gotta love the game. To become really good, you need to live it and sleep it. Financials • Don’t be cocky. Don’t be ashy. There’s always someone • Always be prepared for the worst possible scenario. better than you. Page 2 SUCCESS.com SUCCESS BOOK SUMMARIES Delivering Happiness • Be nice and make friends. It’s a small community. YOUR CULTURE IS YOUR BRAND • Share what you’ve learned with others. Building a brand today is very di erent from building a • Look for opportunities beyond just the game you sat down brand 50 years ago. It used to be that a few people got together to play. You never know who you’re getting to meet, in a room, decided what the brand positioning was going to including new friends for life or new business contacts. be, and then spent a lot of money buying advertising telling • Have fun. The game is a lot more enjoyable when you’re people what their brand was. And if you were able to spend trying to do more than just make money. enough money, then you were able to build your brand. It’s very di erent today. With the Internet connecting Aside from remembering to focus on what’s best for the everyone together, companies are becoming more and more long term, I think the biggest business lesson I learned from transparent whether they like it or not. An unhappy customer poker concerned the most important decision you can make in or disgruntled employee can blog about a bad experience with the game. Although it seems obvious in retrospect, it took me a company, and the story can spread like wild re by e-mail or six months before I nally gured it out. with tools like Twitter. I learned the most important decision I could make was which table to sit at. This included knowing when to change tables. I learned from a book that an experienced player We simply continued doing can make ten times as much money sitting at a table with what we had always done: nine mediocre players who are tired and have a lot of chips compared with sitting at a table with nine really good players constantly improving the who are focused and don’t have that many chips in front customer experience while of them. In business, one of the most important decisions for an simultaneously strengthening entrepreneur or a CEO to make is what business to be in. It our culture. doesn’t matter how awlessly a business is executed if it’s the wrong business or it’s in too small a market. The good news is that the reverse is true as well. A great In a poker room, I could only choose which table I wanted experience with a company can be read by millions of people to sit at. But in business, I realized that I didn’t have to sit at an almost instantaneously as well. existing table. I could de ne my own, or make the one that I The fundamental problem is that you can’t possibly was already at even bigger. I realized that whether in poker, in anticipate every possible touch point that could in uence the business, or in life, it was easy to get caught up and engrossed perception of your company’s brand. For example, if you in what I was currently doing, and that made it easy to forget happen to meet an employee of Company X at a bar, even if that I always had the option to change tables. Psychologically, the employee isn’t working, how you perceive your interaction it’s hard because of all the inertia to overcome.